The Political Dimension of Language
Spring Symposium
27 – 28 May 2026
Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW
On-site and online
Auditorium D 1.04, Tower Building, HGK Basel FHNW
As part of the symposium series Gender and Equality in the Arts
With contributions by Sinzo Aanza, Anchan/Anna Daučíková, Skye Arundhati Thomas, Heike Geißler, Annelyse Gelman, Mayte Gómez Molina, Sophie Jung, Louis Lüthi, Ingo Niermann, Heather Phillipson, Mark Turner, and Simone White
Moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer
Research: Marion Ritzmann
The symposium is open to the public and will be held in English. Free admission.
DAY I – 27 May 2026
Part 1
10.00 am Welcome by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer
10.15 am Quinn Latimer, The Offscreen Voice (Drones and Drones)
10.30 am Simone White, ALL RED
11.15 am Mark Turner, Causation, Agency, Time, and Space (CATS): How Cognitive and
Linguistic Compression Make Politics Possible
Noon Lunch break
Part 2
2.00 pm Welcome
2.05 pm Anchan/Anna Daučíková, Interstice: What Remains Unpronounced
2.45 pm Sinzo Aanza, Ngwaki: The Funeral Dance and the Poetic Project
3.20 pm Break
3.35 pm Mayte Gómez Molina, Beyond a Paper Body
4.15 pm Annelyse Gelman, Vexations
5.00 pm Round-up of DAY I
5.20 pm End of DAY I
DAY II – 28 May 2026
Part 3
10.00 am Welcome by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer
10.15 am Quinn Latimer, The Offscreen Voice (Drones and Drones)
10.30 am Heather Phillipson, My Literary Origin Story
11.20 am Louis Lüthi, The Work of Composition
Noon Lunch break
Part 4
2.00 pm Heike Geißler, Mitschrift (online)
2.25 pm Sophie Jung, To Snare a Sensibility in Words
3.05 pm Ingo Niermann, Hieroglyphs of the Monadic Age
3.40 pm Break
3.55 pm Skye Arundhati Thomas, Writing History (online)
4.30 pm Round-up of DAY II
5.00 pm End of DAY II
Following the first day of the symposium, on 27 May, from 5.30 pm, the group exhibition Unfortunate Grammar
will open at Atelier Mondial in Basel/Münchenstein. Curated by Sincerely, the exhibition is on view until 7 June,
and is a collaboration between Atelier Mondial and Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW.
Language does not just give name to the world, it produces it. Should we want to make a new world—and we do—we will have to begin with language then. The spring symposium at Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW on 27 and 28 May 2026, is devoted to language in all its ancient and nascent scenes and technologies. How does literature, its ambient forms and practices, shape cognition? How do narrative, metaphor, and linguistic ambiguity allow us to think beyond hegemonic ideas of progress, to feel and imagine from multifold poetics and continuums? What does language do—spoken, sung, written, seen, debased, incantatory, human or non—to our bodies and societies? The Political Dimension of Language brings together poets, artists, scholars, novelists, and filmmakers—writers all—whose own irradiating languages examine and embody such questions. Moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer, the symposium is part of the biannual symposia series on issues of artistic practice and the social, held at Institute Art Gender Nature since 2018.
The symposium is dedicated to the memory of Henrike Naumann.
Following the first day of the symposium, on 27 May 2025, from 5.30 pm, a group exhibition curated by Sincerely will open at Atelier Mondial in Basel/Münchenstein. The exhibition is on view until 7 June 2026, and is a collaboration between Atelier Mondial and Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW.
Link
https://dertank.ch/symposia/#thepoliticaldimensionoflanguage
BIOGRAPHIES OF PARTICIPANTS
Sinzo Aanza is a Congolese writer and artist working among literature, the performing arts, and
installation. His practice examines discourse, power, and the poetics and politics of fiction as a
radical tool, contributing to a critically engaged, transdisciplinary redefinition of contemporary
Congolese art. The author of Généalogie d’une banalité (Vents d'ailleurs, 2015), Aanza develops
research-based, text-driven works that circulate across international exhibitions, residencies, and
literary platforms.
Skye Arundhati Thomas is a writer from India. They are currently Associate Curator and Editor at
TBA21. They are editor of Palestine is Everywhere (Silver Press/TBA21, 2025), an anthology of
writing and art from and on Gaza. Their latest book, cowritten with Izabella Scott, is Pleasure
Gardens: Blackouts and the Logic of Crisis in Kashmir (MACK Books, 2024).
Anchan/Anna Daučíková, born in Bratislava, lives and works in Prague. Their artistic practice
includes painting and drawing, photography, performance, installation, and moving images. They
explore the potentials of queering, desire, and non-normative sexuality as well as poverty, postSoviet trauma, and memory. Multichannel video works of recent years transport queer statements,
whereby the artist’s own body and body movements are accompanied by texts and voiceover
narrative.
Heike Geißler, born in Riesa, is a writer who often works in cross-disciplinary contexts and in
various formations. She is the author of Verzweiflungen (Suhrkamp, 2025) and Arbeiten (Hanser
Berlin, 2025), among other books. The recipient of the Klopstock Prize for New Literature, the
Bavarian Book Prize, and the Heinrich Böll Prize of the city of Cologne, she was recently the
Dorothea Schlegel Artist-in-Residence at FU Berlin. Her novel Michaela Kohlhaas will be published
in May 2026. She lives in Leipzig.
Annelyse Gelman is writer and artist whose work spans poetry, sound, and performance. She is the
author of Vexations (University of Chicago Press, 2023), winner of the James Laughlin Award and
longlisted for the National Book Award, as well as Everyone I Love Is a Stranger to Someone (Write
Bloody, 2014). Her album About Repulsion (Fonograf Editions, 2019), a collaboration with
programmer Jason Grier, is a suite of six songs exploring intimacy, power, and vulnerability.
Mayte Gómez Molina is a writer, new media artist and researcher from Granada, Spain. Her
practice mixes writing and digital tools to create expanded formats of literature. She works with 3D,
VR, and video games, as well as with the normative book format. Her films have been exhibited
internationally at institutions and festivals, and her first poem book, Los Trabajos Sin Hércules
(Ediciones Hiperión, 2022) won the National Young Poetry Award of Spain. Her first novel, La boca
llena de trigo (Anagrama, 2026) was published this spring.
Sophie Jung works across text, sculpture, and performance. Her sculptures believe in agnostic
alliances, cross-material solidarity, and assemblages that defy resolution. Her writing exists in the
tradition of écriture feminine and lives as polyvocal collage, often materialized and extended
collaboratively. Upcoming shows include a solo show at Kunsthalle Bern, in 2026, and MUDAM, in
2027, Luxemburg. She is currently working on her first monograph with Mousse Publishing. In 2018
she was the recipient of the Manor Kunstpreis.
Quinn Latimer is a writer, editor, curator, and Head of the MA at the Institute Art Gender Nature
HGK Basel FHNW. She is the author of Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems (Sternberg Press,
2017), Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (Mousse, 2013), Film as a Form of Writing (WIELS,
2013), and Rumored Animals (Dream Horse Press, 2012). She recently curated SIREN (some
poetics), at Amant, New York, and Perpetual Language: Patricia L. Boyd and Na Mira, made under
the signs and spirits of Roland Barthes and Teresa Hak Kyung Cha, at Croy Nielsen, Vienna. She
was editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel.
Louis Lüthi is the author of Infant A (Paraguay Press, 2012), A Die with Twenty-Six Faces
(LAPS/Roma Publications, 2019), and On the Self-Reflexive Page II (Roma, 2021). A recipient of the
Swiss Design Award in 2015, he has designed books in close collaboration with artists including
Rossella Biscotti, Katinka Bock, Gerald Domenig, Ellen Gallagher, gerlach en koop, and Shirin
Sabahi. As an editor at the Geopolitical Open Atlas of the Polity of Literature, or GOAT PoL, he
works with displaced, incarcerated, and disenfranchised writers. He teaches at the Gerrit Rietveld
Academie in Amsterdam.
Chus Martínez is a writer and curator, and Head of Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW.
She is curator of Ocean Space, in Venice, for TBA21–Academy, and curatorial director of der TANK,
in Basel. Previously, she was Artistic Director of the 36th Ljubljana Biennale (2025), and curator of
KölnSkulptur #9. Her books include Like This: Natural Intelligence as Seen by Art (Hatje Cantz,
2022), Corona Tales: Let Life Happen to You (Sternberg Press, 2020), and Club Univers (Sternberg
Press, 2017). She was Head of the Department of Artistic Direction for DOCUMENTA (13), in
Kassel.
Ingo Niermann is a writer, artist, and the editor of the speculative book series Solution (Sternberg
Press). Recently published projects include The Monadic Age: Notes on the Coming Social Order
(Sternberg Press, 2024), and the podcast series Ocean Wants (2021). Niermann initiated the Army
of Love, a collective that tests and promotes a need-oriented redistribution of sensual love.
Niermann is a lecturer at Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW, where he also edits the
digital publishing project Wild Papers.
Heather Phillipson is an artist, filmmaker, and poet who was nominated for the Turner Prize in
2022. Phillipson’s sculpture THE END was selected for the Fourth Plinth commission, Trafalgar
Square, UK, from 2020 to 2022. Recent solo projects include SPRITZ!, a permanent outdoor
sculpture for Hospital Rooms, UK (2025) and Extra Time at Kunsthalle St Annen, Lübeck (2024).
Phillipson received the Film London Jarman Award, in 2016, and the European Short Film Festival
selection from the International Film Festival Rotterdam, in 2018.
Mark Turner is Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve
University, in Cleveland, Ohio. He is the author of The Origin of Ideas: Blending, Creativity, and the
Human Spark (Oxford University Press, 2015). The founding director of the Cognitive Science
Network, and codirector of the Red Hen Lab™, Turner is a recipient of the Anneliese Maier
Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and a laureate of the Prix du
Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises from the Académie Française.
Simone White is a poet and critic based in New York. She is the author of Dear Angel of Death
(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), or, on being the other woman (Duke University Press, 2022), and the
forthcoming books Warring, a book-length essay on rap music, and New Poems for Museums. A
graduate of Wesleyan University, she holds a JD from Harvard Law School, an MFA from the New
School, and a PhD in English from CUNY Graduate Center. She is Associate Professor of English at
the University of Pennsylvania where she also directs the Kelly Writers House. She is the recipient of
the 2017 Whiting Award in Poetry, a 2020 Creative Capital Award, and the 2024 Dorothea Tanning
Award from Foundation for Contemporary Art.